Cinephiles

The New York Film Critics Circle Awards, held last Monday at Tao, in the Maritime Hotel, united filmmakers and movie stars with the critics who had nominated them. Before the ceremony, near the bar, Ellar Coltrane, the star of “Boyhood,” talked with Pawel Pawlikowski, the director of “Ida,” and a civilian; Bob Balaban bumped into a writer and said, “Please forgive me.” In a corner, away from critics, the recipient of the ceremony’s Special Award, Adrienne Mancia—an eighty-seven-year-old longtime MOMA and BAM film curator, who introduced New York audiences to Pasolini, de Oliveira, Cinema Novo, European animation, Bertolucci, and other provocative delights—talked with her friend Bill Murray, who would present her award.

Mancia, who is short (“I used to be five-two; now I’m hoping I’m five”) and is known for wearing dark glasses everywhere (“We all have our specialties”), wore a thick black sweater embroidered with red flowers. Murray, gray-haired and nattily turned out, reminisced about their long friendship. “Let’s get our story straight,” he said. “We met through Helen Scott, in New York.” That was around 1983. “Helen Scott was a famous—”

“Wonderful, very important woman,” Mancia said.

“Who I met through Bob Benton,” Murray said. (“Kramer vs. Kramer.”)

“She was head of the French Film Office.”

“She brought the Nouvelle Vague to the States, and brought it to Adrienne.”

“She was a close friend of Truffaut.”

“She was the translator in ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut,’ ” Murray said. He held up a yellowed typewritten note. “I have a letter from her that Adrienne found, and I’m mentioned in it.” He said it was about “these grandes dames of the cinema—what were they going to do when time marches on?” It mentioned Murray escorting Scott around Paris. “I enjoyed taking her around. That’s sort of my job sometimes, I understand that,” he said.

Mancia, who was born in Brooklyn, spent much of her three-decade tenure at MOMA travelling to film festivals around the world, finding new work. She also encountered a half century’s worth of luminaries, among them Roberto Rossellini, Lillian Gish, Dolores del Rio, Luis Buñuel (“He invited me to his house. He had a case of guns”), Leni Riefenstahl, in a startling phone call (“I happen to be Jewish. I couldn’t talk to her”), Pasolini (“I’m in one of his poems—he talks about ‘walking in New York with Adrienne Mancia’—the biggest thrill of my life!”), and Steven Spielberg, who had a movie in the 1974 New Directors/New Films series, which Mancia co-founded (“And look what happened to him!”).

In 1998, she became a founding curator of BAM Cinématek. (“I was fired at MOMA,” she said. “It was because of my character and personality. I was, like, a dangerous person to have around.”) At BAM, in 2004, she organized a retrospective called “What About Bill Murray?,” attended by hundreds of eager fans.

“I admired his work,” Mancia said. “And also, just to look at him I laugh.”

“That’s one of those double-edged swords,” Murray said.

“Those twinkly eyes—they put me in a good mood,” Mancia said.

“ ‘I look at you and I laugh,’ ” Murray said. “Well.”

A waitress came by with a tray of red wine, and someone suggested ordering “something stiffer.” Murray asked Mancia, “What would you like, Stiffo?”

“Water,” Stiffo said.

“You can’t drink wine at one of these affairs,” Murray said. “You know what I’d like to have? If you could get me a rum and water, like a Sailor Jerry with water.”

Murray removed his jacket and vest. “Did you have ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ at BAM?” he asked Mancia. “It’s a spectacular film, and the only one Tom Schiller ever made.” The conversation turned to great directors who made just a single film (Charles Laughton, “The Night of the Hunter”) and to watching a double feature in which, Murray suggested, one movie unfairly outshined the other (“The Night of the Hunter” and “Shadow of a Doubt”; Murray’s movie “Quick Change,” from 1990, which is dedicated to Helen Scott, and “Kung Fu Hustle,” next to which “pretty much anything is Cream of Wheat”).

The waitress brought Murray two rum-and-water options. He took one and said, of the other, “You give that to the kids at the orphanage.” Mancia’s water came in a clear sealed cylinder that evoked a pneumatic tube. “It’s a grenade, too,” Murray said. “ ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ was on TV today, I think.”

“I don’t like to watch on TV,” Mancia said. “I like to go out and see films. I try to go almost every day.”

“I was going to call you today and see if you wanted to go to the movies,” Murray said. “But I figured you were probably, you know, getting your hair done.”

In his introductory speech, Murray told the audience that when Mancia was at MOMA she vowed not to show films by anyone who was “either a friend or a lover.” He said, “None of my films are at MOMA.”

Mancia said that the N.Y.F.C.C. had never given an award “to someone who was dumped, fired, kicked out of so many jobs. That someone is me.” She thanked the critics and mentioned a favorite film title: Shôhei Imamura’s “Vengeance Is Mine.” ♦

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyor­ker.com.